Nishida and Western Philosophy (review)

This account of the philosophy of Nishida Kitarō is lucid, insightful, and deeply informative—despite the highly questionable argument that gives the book its structure. In comparison with other, technically more accurate accounts of Nishida's philosophy, it is broader in scope than most but more single-minded in its approach. The analysis is for the most part limited to four books that have been translated into English, out of approximately 16 volumes of philosophical essays in Japanese, but it aims to capture the contours and most important details of Nishida's entire philosophy. To appreciate the achievement of this account, one would need only to read, in English translation or in the Japanese original, any of the volumes with their streams of repetitive, puzzling expressions and circuitous, often dead- end argumentation. Wilkinson's elucidation of details in the passages he samples makes it easier to understand why Nishida is considered Japan's greatest academic philosopher. A critical look at the frame of the book and some of its own claims reveals where, to my mind, it has gone astray.

The argument that frames this book is repeated throughout: Nishida's philosophy is an attempt to articulate, in a characteristically Western philosophical manner, the Zen experience he had as a young man. Nishida first made the attempt by using the conceptual frameworks of Western philosophers, and after they failed him he developed his own, largely by recasting Buddhist insights. In the end, a philosophical articulation of the Zen worldview in Western terms—or even in Eastern terms recast by conceptual, Western philosophical methods—proved impossible. What Nishida attempted is incommensurable with Western philosophy.

While the author first offers these statements as hypotheses (p. 2), one premise of his argument—that there is such a thing as "the Zen world-view" or "the Zen experience"—remains unquestioned; and another—that Nishida's pivotal experience was the Zen experience—is asserted as "beyond question" (p. 151; see also pp. 28, 48, 10, 114).

Wilkinson's presentation of Zen in the first chapter is drawn largely from D. T. Suzuki, with help from Suzuki's protégé, Abe Masao; some comments on time, birth, and death in Dōgen's Shōbōgenzō; and a few other sources. The result is a caricature that imagines Zen as an invariable, unitary experience. In fact, Dōgen's teachings on practice as the manifestation of enlightenment do not sit well with D. T. Suzuki's emphasis on a satori experience, and Suzuki does not enlighten us about what Zen in its various practices has historically been. The author would have benefited from acquaintance with other presentations by Zen teachers, such as that of Shunryū Suzuki's Zen Mind Beginner's Mind, with historical accounts of Zen traditions, and with contrasts between Dōgen's view of time and sam · sāra and that of other Buddhist philosophers.¹ A little research in contemporary Zen scholarship would have shown how implausible is the talk of "nirvana or awareness of mu" (p. 24), "the basic Zen position [that] never varies" (p. 3), "the Zen vision" (pp. 5, 7), "Zen epistemology" (pp. 20–21), "Zen experience" (p. 59), "the conception of time involved in Zen" (p. 15), and "the fundamental Zen assertion that there is no absolute time" (p. 16). Even if Dōgen's notion that time and being are nondual (p. 16) epitomized most of Zen, Nishida's early notion of "a transcendent, unchanging reality apart from time" (p. 51) would contrast sharply with it.

Equally questionable is Wilkinson's contention that Nishida's "pure experience" is equivalent to Zen satori. The notion of pure experience Nishida developed in his first major work may be pivotal for his entire philosophy, but he never claims or implies that any part of his philosophy presupposes an exceptional experience like satori that grounds his convictions and renders them unverifiable to those who have not had the experience, as Wilkinson intimates (pp. 55, 159, 161). Nishida...